1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a video browser, and more particularly to a video browser for browsing a video based on relations between characters.
2. Background of the Related Art
Typically, users simply view movies and/or dramas as broadcasted through a TV or played at a movie theatre. However, a user may wish to view a particular movie or drama at a particular time, or wish to view only a particular section of a movie or a drama. Accordingly, various techniques which enables a selective watching of a movie/drama or sections of a movie/drama have been suggested.
In the related art, for example, various video data may be represented or classified into format portion, index portion, media portion, segment portion, target portion, and/or representation portion. Also, data on various characters or objects such as a name of an object, position on the screen, numeric data with relation to a segment of the video data in which the object appears, may be represented by the target and representation portion. Accordingly, a user can select an object through a table and reproduce for display a particular segment where the object is shown in the video.
In other related art, various additional data of a video data are obtained before, during or after the production of the video data. Thereafter, an additional information table of the obtained data is composed and provided to users. Namely, the additional data table may include a position where an actor appears, a position where a character of the actor appears, and a position where stage properties appear, such that a scene can be reproduced as selected by a user through the additional data table. For example, if a user selects a stage property, information on the selected stage property such as the manufacturer and price may be displayed on a screen, and the user may be able connect with the manufacturer or a seller of the stage property through a network connection.
In still other related art, recording information on each segment of a video in a video map has been suggested. That is, information such as the degree of violence, the degree of adult contents, the degree of importance of contents, characters positions, and the degree of difficulty in understanding may be indicated for each segment of a video in the video map. Thus, the user may set a degree of preference for one or more items of the video map, and only segments of the video meeting the set degree of preference would be reproduced, thereby limiting a display of particular contents to unauthorized viewers.
Similarly, other techniques in the related art as described above provide items simply arranged without any relation to the objects appearing in the movie or drama, based upon the selection of the user. However, the contents of a movie or drama generally build around relations between characters, places and events. For example, relations between characters may not change from beginning to the end of the story or may continuously vary. Moreover, since one or more characters can relate to a specific character in the movie or drama, the browsing method in the related art substantially fails to provide an accurate understanding of the story of the movie or drama to the user.
Therefore, techniques in the related arts have disadvantages in that it is difficult to understand a video centering on relations among characters according to the development of events, changes of relations, and relations among characters and places as events develop.